Big chunk of India AI Mission fund to go into AI compute

Forty-four percent of ₹10,371.92 crore earmarked for providing capacity of over 10,000 GPUs

- Aditi Agrawal

Forty-four percent, or ₹4,563.36 crore, of the ₹10,371.92 crore approved by the Cabinet for the India AI Mission in March is earmarked for providing compute capacity of more than 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) over a period of five years, minister of state for electronics and information technology Jitin Prasada informed the Lok Sabha on Wednesday in a written response.

Nineteen percent, or ₹1,971.37 crore, is allocated for an India AI Innovation Centre (IAIC). The IAIC will develop and deploy indigenous large multimodal models (LMMs) and domain-specific foundational models in critical sectors.

Another 18.7%, or ₹1,942.5 crore, is allocated for startup financing.

This was the first time that the government has given details of allocations for the seven pillars under the India AI Mission. The entire corpus is meant for a period of five years. Prasada was answering a question by Trinamool Congress MP Sajda Ahmed.

In July, a new allocation of ₹551.75 crore was made for the India AI Mission in the Centre's budget for MeitY.